Glen Garioch Distillery

Glen Garioch
Distillery

Glen Garioch Distillery (pronounced "Glen Geery") stands in back
streets on the northern edge of the attractive
Aberdeenshire town of
Oldmeldrum. It can be accessed via the
narrow lanes that run north from the town centre, but is most easy to reach by
turning off the A947 on the northern edge of Oldmeldrum along a residential road
indicated by a brown tourist signpost. This brings you down past the large
stone maltings to the distillery itself.

Glen Garioch Distillery looks and feels (and smells) exactly as a
distillery should. The urban setting means you'd stop short of ever calling it
pretty, but with its (no longer used) maltings and twin pagodas, and the large
window on the front of the stillhouse, it simply oozes character. The name
comes from The Garioch, the broad and very fertile valley of the River Urie to
the west of Oldmeldrum, renowned for the
quality of its barley.

The distillery is owned by Morrison Bowmore, whose also own
Bowmore Distillery on
Islay and Auchentoshan Distillery
near Glasgow. As noted above, in
common with most other Scottish distilleries, the maltings at Glen Garioch are
no longer used. But they do still exist, as do the kilns topped off by their
pagodas. Given the local availability of excellent barley and Glen Garioch's
increasing emphasis over the years on increasing the quality of its output
(which now all becomes single malt scotch whisky), there have from time to time
been suggestions in the media that the distillery might resume the malting on
site of at least some of the barley it uses, as is done at
Bowmore. It would be
wonderful if this ever happened.

For the moment, however, visitors are attracted to Glen Garioch by
the character of the distillery itself, and by the fact that it is Scotland's
most easterly distillery: and geographical extremes are always more attractive
to collectors.

It is also one of Scotland's oldest legal distilleries. One usually
reliable source talks of an announcement in The Aberdeen
Journal in 1785 of a licensed distillery on the site which, if correct,
would make it Scotland's oldest legal distillery. This is not a story repeated
by other sources, however, and the distillery itself claims to date back to May
1797 when brothers John and Alexander Manson established a distillery and a
brewery on the site of what had previously been a tannery. That is still a
pretty impressive heritage.

We've already discussed the pronunciation of the name, but there is
another aspect of it that also needs clearing up. Traditionally, the distillery
name was written as "Glengarioch", but the whisky it produced was known as
"Glen Garioch". The single word presentation of the name can still be found
stencilled onto the ends of casks at the distillery, and on the body of the
spirit safe in the stillhouse. But the signs on the outside of the stillhouse
and above the door of the visitor centre refer to "Glen Garioch", and this is
also the version used on the distillery's own website: it is therefore the
approach we have taken in this feature.

The ownership of Glen Garioch Distillery remained in the hands of
the Manson family for over 90 years, though from 1837 it was operated in tandem
with their nearby Strathmeldrum Distillery. In 1884 it was sold to J. G.
Thomson & Co of Leith. When the whisky writer
Alfred Barnard visited in
1886 during a grand tour of Scotland's distilleries he found a distillery that
sounds similar in some respects to the one we see today, though sadly it was
not the subject of one of the sketches that adorn some of the entries in the
book he subsequently wrote. Perhaps the most striking feature of his two page
entry on "Glengarioch" is its setting, being preceded by entries on
distilleries in Peterhead
and Old Deer and being followed by
entries about three distilleries in
Aberdeen. All have since
closed, leaving Glen Garioch as the most easterly distillery in Scotland.

The distillery subsequently came under the control of William
Sanderson, largely because he wanted to protect the supply of the main
component of his increasingly successful blended whisky, VAT69, which had been
launched in July 1882. In the 1930s Sanderson & Son became part of
Distillers Company Limited, before being taken over by Scotch Malt Distillers
in 1943. They closed the distillery in 1968. It reopened in 1973 under the
ownership of Stanley P. Morrison Ltd, a predecessor of Morrison Bowmore.

Your visit to Glen Garioch begins in the attractive visitor centre
conveniently located close to the car park and on the opposite side of the road
from the main production elements of the distillery. As already noted, the
maltings are no longer used, but it is fascinating to visit the kilns beneath
the pagodas. And a little frustrating, as you get the impression that all it
would take to restart this part of the process would some kindling:
superficially at least, the kilns look to be in perfect working order.

The first stage of the production process currently undertaken at
Glen Garioch is the milling of the malted barley, which takes place in a
Porteus Mill. A set of spiral steel stairs in the mill room lead up to the
level above, where you find the feeder and stone box.

Moving on, Glen Garioch has a single large stainless steel mash tun
in a room only just large enough to accommodate it. Nearby is the room
containing the eight stainless steel washbacks. These are set considerably
higher relative to the floor than in most distilleries, so there are several
sets of moveable wooden steps to allow access to their tops. You can find out
more about Making Malt
Whisky from our series of feature pages showing the stages in the process.

Most visitors would agree that the heart of any distillery is the
still room. At Glen Garioch the still room looks out through a large window
towards the visitor centre, and is, unusually, home to three stills. Trying to
work out how this arrangement operates in practice is likely to give you a
headache. The truth is that, although some sources state that the number of
stills was increased from 2 to 3 when the distillery reopened in 1973, the
three still layout has never actually operated in practice. From 1973 the
distillery had four stills: two wash stills and two spirit stills.

In more recent times one of the wash stills came to the end of its
useful life (the copper that stills are made from acts as a catalyst in the
distillation process and is actually consumed over time). Efforts to replace it
on a like for like basis were thwarted by the difficulty of meeting modern
health and safety standards within the structure of the existing stillhouse so
the decision was taken to use just a single pair of stills. The second spirit
still is therefore no longer used, but remains in place because removing it
would be highly disruptive. This sequence of events helps explain why there is
a large open area at the front of the stillhouse where the second wash still
once stood.

Standard distillery tours then return for a dram in the visitor
centre, while VIP tours move on to view a bonded warehouse, in which casks of
spirit are very, very slowly becoming scotch whisky.